Biomedicine in museums

After today’s SLSA afternoon sessions I walked down Luisenstrasse through the Humboldt University medical campus (Charité) and suddenly saw this poster hanging on a fence:

“Are you doing research? Do you want to know more about several biomedical topics? Join this year’s conference and discuss your results with students from all over the world …”

The poster invites passersby to the 19th European Student’s Conference — an event which has taken place at Charité since the fall of the Berlin Wall — one of many East-West reunion activities.

Why am I so fascinated by this little poster? It’s an example of biomedicine on display, yes — but there is more to it. I guess it has something to do with how the biomedical world enters the urban street space and becomes part of our everyday poster display experience, like street announcement of concerts and theatre performances. Isn’t that what they mean by the formation of biocitizenship?

Forget about designing your own animals, molecules, cells and labware on powerpoints. A company called Motifolio (I assume there is a host of similar companies out there) provides an array of custom shapes of biomedical objects: the whole mount of 700 scalable and editable clips costs 149 USD.

Nifty — but like other standardized images and customised power point presentations they will probably become tiring after a while. Isn’t there an emerging blackboard retro movement? 

The medical faculty at the University of Oslo has announced a full/associate professorship in medical history, with a focus on Norwegian history. The candidate shall have a research background in Scandinavian/Norwegian medical history, which sort of narrows the field of possible applicants. Read more here. Deadline for applications is already 1 August 2008.

A few minutes ago — as I was sitting in my beautiful and quiet room in Schokofabrik (the best B&B in Berlin), struggling with my paper on art and science in medical museums for the SLSA-session on Friday — a mail dropped in announcing a lecture by science writer Phillip Ball on Thursday 10 July, which may be quite interesting for us in the medical museum business.

Phillip Ball lecture is occasioned by his receipt of the 2007 Dingle Prize for communicating the history of science and technology through his book Elegant solutions: Ten Beautiful Experiments in Chemistry (Royal Society of Chemistry, 2005):

Scientists frequently talk about ‘beauty’ in their work, but rarely stop to think quite what they mean by it. What makes an experiment beautiful? Is it the clarity of the design? The elegance of the apparatus? The nature of the knowledge gained? There have been several recent attempts to identify ‘beautiful’ experiments in science, especially in physics. But Philip Ball argues that, not only is chemistry often neglected in these surveys, but it has its own special kinds of beauty, linked to the fact that it is a branch of science strongly tied to the art of making things: new molecules and materials, new smells and colours (my emphasis)

The making of new molecules and materials, smells and colours isn’t restricted to chemistry, of course. Same with biotechnology, tissue engineering, etc. The beauty of, say, a new bladder tissue should then lie, pace Bell, in its new materiality, smells and colours. Good point. Must read the book!

The Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, London, at 7pm

(thanks to Patricia for the mail).

PS to last post: don’t miss the Medical Museion/’Biomedicine on Display’-born session “Recent biomedicine and vitality” on Wednesday 4 june at 15.45-17.15 in the Virchow-Raum, Langenbeck-Virchow-Haus. The session is chaired by Jan Eric Olsén and contains the following papers:

• Sniff Andersen Nexø: A matter of disposal: Enacting aborted foetuses in hospitals.
• Hanne Jessen: Vitality of a scientific model: The coming into being and trajectory of a new laboratory animal.
• Susanne Bauer: Risk assessment software and the biopolitics of prevention.
• Jan Eric Olsén: Life struggles and the invaded body.

If you happen to be in Berlin next week, you are welcome to take part in the session ‘Rethinking Representational Practices in Contemporary Art and Modern Life Sciences’ at the 5th Biannual European Conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA). The session takes place in the Kaiserin-Friederich-Haus (Robert-Koch-Platz 7) on Friday 6 June, 11-13 and has papers by Suzanne Anker, Rob Zwijnenberg, Thomas Söderqvist and Ingeborg Reichle.

First Suzanne Anker (New York), will present a paper about “Semaphores and Surrogates: Stand-ins and Body Doubles”. In 2004 she published (with Dorothy Nelkin) The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2004; see http://www.geneculture.org/

Then art historian Robert Zwijnenberg (Leiden) will talk about “Bio-Art: Concepts and Matter”. Rob is head of The Arts & Genomics Centre at the University of Leiden, see http://www.artsgenomics.org/

As the third speaker, I will talk about “Five (Good and Bad) Reasons why a Medical Museum Director wants to Bring Art and Science together”.

Finally Ingeborg Reichle, who organizes the session will talk about “Art in the Age of Technoscience” and will present some issues she is dealing with in her forthcoming book “Art in the Age of Technoscience. Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art ” (Springer, New York 2009; see: http://www.kunstgeschichte.de/reichle/pub_technoscience_EN.html

For an updated program for the whole SLSA meeting, see here: http://www.zfl.gwz-berlin.de/fileadmin/bilder/Projekte/slsa/update_20080529.pdf

Interesting websites come and go. There are pompous upstarts that fade out because nobody upgrades them, and there are more humble initiatives that flourish gradually. In the latter category is the Synapse website — a very useful tool, not just for us in the science, technology and medical museum world, but for anyone interested in art-science connections.

The core of the site is an continuously updated database with information about collaborative projects between artists and scientists, an overview of art-science exhibitions, details about more than 200 individuals interested in the field, a thumb-nail gallery of works and so forth. Latest added functionality is an active discussion list which has so far dealt with bioart, robotics and augmenting technologies.

Add to this a pleasant interface and easy navigation — and the result is the next-to-perfect online tool for promoting art-science-technology collaborations.

The only thing I miss is a blog function — but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is in the pipe-line.

Congratulations to Vicki Sowry, program manager for art-research-science at the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) in Adelaide for setting the site up last year and keeping it so well updated.

A couple of months ago the Danish Society for Anaesthesiology and Intensive Medicine asked Medical Museion if we were interested in making a small exhibition about the history of Danish anaesthesiology and intensive care in connection with the fourth Annual Meeting of the European Society of Anaesthesiology (Euroanaesthesia 2008) in Copenhagen.

With 5000 potential exhibition visitors in mind, we said yes, of course! So during the last two months Søren Bak-Jensen and Nicole Rehné have worked hard planning the exhibition and setting it up. The European society has supported us with ~10.000 euros, and we have received valuable help from specialists and a few companies (see credits below).

And today it opened in the west end of the main hall of the Bella Center. An 80 sq.m. display area with a Dräger iron lung from 1952 as the iconic object of modern intensive care placed in the middle:

encircled by showcases that display a number of exquisite artefacts from our collections, including, for example, Ruben resuscitators and a curare flask from the turn of the last century. We have also borrowed some objects from medicotechnical companies Radiometer, AMBU and an evocative movie from Klinisk Film.

Here are some more pictures from first couple of hours when the meeting participants streamed into the huge congress building:

And finally the credits:

Special thanks to Dr. Hans Kirkegaard, Chairman of the Danish Society for Anaesthesiology and Intensive Medicine and a specialist on curare, who took the initative in the first place — here photographed while he is inspecting one of the showcases:

The exhibition closes on Tuesday.

No doubt, this kind of exhibitions is a great opportunity to foster contacts between the medical profession, the medicotechnical industry, medical historians and medical ethnographers. We’ll soon be back with more pictures and reflections on this particular kind of extra-mural medical historical object exhibitions.

On Friday 13 June, Andrea Tone, Canada Research Chair in the Social History of Medicine at McGill, will give a talk at Medical Museion about her new book ’The age of anxiety: A history of America’s turbulent affair with tranquilizers’ (forthcoming on Basic Books). Among her earlier books are Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America and Medicating Modern America: Prescription Drugs in History (with Elizabeth Siegel Watkins). Now she’s working on the history of post-WWII psychopharmacology, which is one of our active research areas here at Medical Museion — see more about Jesper Vaczy Kragh’s research project here.

The meeting, which begins at 2pm, is co-organised by Jesper and the Danish Society for Psychosocial Medicine (Rikke Krølner). Please pre-register at sej@si-folkesundhed.dk.

At last, we have put together a list of books, articles and unpublished PhD-theses with relation to the ‘Biomedicine on Display’-project published between 2005 and 2008. Unfortunately, very few of these publications are yet available online. If you want a copy of any of these, contact the author.

Only publications with relation to the BoD-project are listed. For full publication lists for each author, see here.